Sugar Man's Daughterby Lucy Crowe

Nicola Thomas writes letters to her dead father. She makes her living putting out fires, and she makes her home in the house-that heroin-bought on a green Jell-O lake in central Illinois. The wind over the water cries like a little child, and all the votive candles in Saint Michael’s can’t push back the night; Nicola’s father remains as brilliant and violent in death as he was in life. Running from a miscarriage that she wished into actuality and pursued by the unwanted attentions of an ex boyfriend, Nicola is trying to learn how to breathe again. She is also discovering that the people closest to her wield the most damaging weapons of all. John Santangelo – smooth as Baileys over ice, and just as sweet – will ultimately use her as a means to an end even while he is falling in love with her. And nothing could prepare Nicola for Benny Jones, the little half witch southern girl who blows into town in the wake of a hurricane and becomes something more than a friend.